Poll about Moneyball

[Metropolitan]

Who does everyone think is the best "moneyball" team outside of baseball? Pretty much a team who uses their small amount of money wisely is what i'm looking for here.

[rudel.dietrich]

Originally Posted by Metropolitan

Who does everyone think is the best "moneyball" team outside of baseball? Pretty much a team who uses their small amount of money wisely is what i'm looking for here.

Do you mean from a sport that is outside of baseball?

I am very confused

[Metropolitan]

Originally Posted by rudel.dietrich

Do you mean from a sport that is outside of baseball?

I am very confused

Yeah, a sport that isn't baseball

[mytreds]

Moneyball is a failed ideology so the question is a bit irrelevant.

[Metropolitan]

Originally Posted by mytreds

Moneyball is a failed ideology so the question is a bit irrelevant.

I was more so talking about teams who don't spend much but are still successful. Think the Tampa Bay Rays for example.

[rudel.dietrich]

Originally Posted by Metropolitan

Yeah, a sport that isn't baseball

Most other sports have salary caps which makes it hard to make any kind of answer to your question.


But the whole idea of Moneyball has been so twisted by those who do not understand it and never did understand it to begin with.

The idea was to look for undervalued players and market inefficiencies.
That is it, end of story


Now every nearly every single team is trying to do the same thing.

I cannot really think of any examples of small market teams succeeding, because of the salary cap, small markets are not as big of hurdles as in baseball.

But I would say some examples of teams in smaller markets being more successful than might be expected would be Tampa Bay in hockey, Kansas City in the NFL, New England in the NFL (they are not a small market, but before 2001, New England was an afterthought in the NFL) and finally, San Antonio in basketball.

In every case, they drafted well, looked for inefficiencies in the market and were a few years ahead of determining who the overlooked players would be with undervalued skill sets.

[Cod]

Originally Posted by rudel.dietrich

Most other sports have salary caps which makes it hard to make any kind of answer to your question

Do a lot of international leagues have salary caps? I only follow football/soccer and other than UEFA's pretend FFP rules, there aren't really any caps.

The idea was to look for undervalued players and market inefficiencies.
That is it, end of story

This is 100% correct. Moneyball was just a name given to the process by Michael Lewis (or someone similar). The process can be applied to anything and has been utilized by professional gamblers for decades.

As for the original question, the best examples I can think of are Brentford FC and Brighton & Hove Albion FC, both of which are in the EPL. Coincidentally, both are owned by amateur mathematicians that made their wealth in gambling and markets.

[slic1149]

San Antonio is a small market and the Spurs basketball team managed to keep their core players signed for a decade and a half. This stretch produced five championships, three Hall of Fame players and a Hall of Fame coach. Their management team is perhaps the best in professional sports. For small market success it is difficult to come up with a more successful team than the San Antonio Spurs.

[kq76]

Can any team in the NBA really count as a moneyball team though? I don't know their payrolls, but I thought the spread of theirs wasn't nearly as much as the spread you see in baseball. You don't often hear, "team X couldn't afford player Y" only that "player Y doesn't want to go to team X" for whatever reason. Maybe payroll disparity isn't necessary to qualify as a moneyball team for some people, but I think it is. I mean, any team or business worth anything probably tries to identify something they can do well that others don't. Would you call any team near the top of their sport a moneyball team simply because someone says they're doing something others aren't?

Maybe the Spurs should be congratulated for having a good enough organization that maybe the only big name that didn't want to be there was Leonard, but I'd say that's a pretty low bar. It's no real surprise they did well with how high of draft picks they've been awarded. Other than maybe identifying Popovich and whatever magic he may wield, did they really identify and exploit any market inefficiencies? Does their great passing game count? Should Golden State count for figuring out how underutilized the three-pointer game was? Was either team in nearly the financial shape as the Athletics were/are before they turned things around? If so, then okay, maybe they do qualify.

[Syd Thrift]

There's definitely "team X doesn't want to go over the cap / into the luxury tax" used as an excuse in the NBA. Sure, since players have agency in that league, there's also a lot of "player Y doesn't want to play for team X" too. I think my big thing with the NBA in general is that teams and lineups are much, much smaller so I think there's less space to mess with market inefficiencies.

I'm not sure the Spurs count here in that regard. They drafted fairly well, picked up a couple guys in Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili who were maybe sliiiightly undervalued because the league didn't take Euro-ball as seriously at the time, but I don't know that they were playing "moneyball" per se. I'd credit keeping guys on the team more to Greg Popovich than anything else. To me the Warriors understanding the value of the 3 is less on the franchise and more on Steph Curry and to a lesser extent Steve Kerr.

I think Daryl Morey has *tried* to do Moneyball type stuff during his career - I know he was really hitting the "find market inefficiencies through stats" thing hard with Houston - but I'm not sure he's actually been super-successful with that. Like, granted, the Moneyball A's were led by 2 great pitchers and Eric Chavez at third base too, but Morey's path to success has been more "have James Harden on your team" and then "have Joel Embiid on your team" than anything else there (and at that he apparently violated a handshake agreement he had with Harden in Philly).

Like... I would go back to the 2005 Sonics as a "Moneyball" type team, although they completely fell apart when they let Nate McMillan walk. That was a team completely cobbled together with spare parts - and yes, Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis, but there were lots of guys on that team like Jerome James and Danny Fortson who were little more than end-of-the-bench guys throughout the rest of their careers.

With football, yeah, Belicheat in the 2000s and into the 2010s was 100% a "market inefficiencies" guys. Remember how he loved putting athletic offensive players on defense (which, hell, he even did pretty late with Gronk, although he also showed why you don't want to rely on that)? He also of course found Brady but to a great degree he also created Brady in the first few years by focusing on the run and using Brady similarly to how Kyle Shanahan is using Brock Purdy right now.

I'm a homer of course but I might also point to the Seahawks and the Legion of Boom, too. That team was basically formed by Pete Carroll having intimate knowledge of 2 or 3 draft classes and just picking up everyone he liked. There's a common misconception that Moneyball has to be about stats, but that's not 100% true: it was a thing in baseball because at the time a lot of front offices weren't paying attention to some stats, which created a big gaping hole to drive through. But having very, very detailed scouting knowledge from having a head coach who was literally working with a lot of the players he's now considering drafting is also a market efficiency in its own right... and I'd also go ahead and call the entire Seahawks defense an exercise in zigging when the rest of the league is zagging (running that Elephant front 7 that found a use for Chris Clemons when the rest of the league considered him a one-dimensional pass rusher, building out a secondary comprised of 3 big hitters and, I will grant you, a Hall of Fame level safety in Earl Thomas, finding a way to make that Clemons line work by using a guy like Red Bryant at the other end, etc.).

[monkeyman576]

Like the Sacramento Kings?

[pilight]

Originally Posted by slic1149

San Antonio is a small market and the Spurs basketball team managed to keep their core players signed for a decade and a half. This stretch produced five championships, three Hall of Fame players and a Hall of Fame coach. Their management team is perhaps the best in professional sports. For small market success it is difficult to come up with a more successful team than the San Antonio Spurs.

They kept Tim Duncan, that's what really mattered. Popovich is a sub-.500 coach without Duncan in the lineup.

[Cobra Mgr]

Wouldn't the best way to figure it out is divide team salary by wins? Whoever is spending the less for each win would, theoretically, be getting the most bag for their buck, right? Where is Orange?

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by mytreds

Moneyball is a failed ideology so the question is a bit irrelevant.

Not sure what you're about here.

Getting good players cheaply is the Holy Grail of sports team management.

[rudel.dietrich]

Originally Posted by Cod

Do a lot of international leagues have salary caps? I only follow football/soccer and other than UEFA's pretend FFP rules, there aren't really any caps.

No, not really
I do not know of any football league outside of MLS who uses one.
And MLS cap rules are pretty hard to figure out with designated player spots, veteran maxes, young player maxes and so many exceptions to almost every rule.

The KHL hockey league that used to be the 2nd best behind the NHL uses a salary cap.
But that league is a bit of a mess right now because Russia has been a naughty child the last few years.
All of the non Russian teams have left the league.

French basketball is getting a salary cap next season in an attempt to make the league financially healthier.
There has been talk of the Euroleague for basketball having some sort of salary cap or financial rules like the UEFA Financial fair play rules.


One example I can think of from European football is Olympique Lyonnais from the early to mid 2000s

They won the league 7 times in a row despite being upper mid level in terms of revenue.
They latched onto the market inefficiency of bringing in youth players, or buying them cheap from other teams, and playing them for a few years to build their value and win matches, and then selling the for high prices.
They did this for almost a decade and won a lot of championships doing it.

But then teams like Monaco and to a larger extent PSG came in over the top with heaps of cash and that ended.

Also other teams poached the brain trust from Lyon and now they are spread out over Europe.

[rudel.dietrich]

Originally Posted by kq76

Can any team in the NBA really count as a moneyball team though?

To a certain degree you can.

There always have been and always will be market inefficiencies.

Until the early 2010s, it took the league 30 years to realize 'this 3 point shot is worth 50% more than a 2 point shot, lets shoot more of them and get players who are good at shooting them'

But every team very quickly caught onto that.

As someone else mentioned, Daryl Morey kind of took it to the extreme in that every shot should be at the rim or from the 3 point line.

I think a bit of what got lost is that the mid range shot was not necessarily seen as a bad shot at all times. It was the contested mid range shot that was frowned upon.

I think you can use 'moneyball' concepts in the NBA.
But almost every team now has very smart people in the front office looking for the next thing.
So you can only really be ahead a season or even half a season before they will catch up to you.

[Cobra Mgr]

Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr

Wouldn't the best way to figure it out is divide team salary by wins? Whoever is spending the less for each win would, theoretically, be getting the most bag for their buck, right? Where is Orange?

So I got out the calculator. Took the team salary & divided it by total wins (Reg + Playoffs) and came up w/this in the NBA. Among playoff teams, Memphis paid the fewest for their wins, Clippers the most. Among non playoff teams, the Pacers got the most bang for their buck, while the Pistons paid over $1.2M more than the next worse for their victories.

Mem 2,410,505
Den 2,457,989
Bos 2,599,938
Mia 2,680,106
Phi 2,694,948
NYK 2,835,162
Cle 2,972,336
Sac 3,035,593
Mil 3,082,191
Atl 3,389,403
PHX 3,447,192
LAL 3,462,833
Ind 3,542,326
Tor 3,640,492
NO  3,668,814
Bkn 3,702,249
Chi 3,733,992
OKC 3,791,162
Min 3,975,152
Uta 3,977,365
GSt 3,986,417
Orl 4,067,998
LAC 4,386.939
Por 4,590,332
SA  4,615,866
Dal 4,739,220
Was 5,251,474
Cha 5,409,246
Hou 6,286,206
Det 7,510,206

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by slic1149

San Antonio is a small market . . .

San Antonio is the 24th largest metropolitan area by population in the U.S.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr

Wouldn't the best way to figure it out is divide team salary by wins?

That's the usual to measure it, giving an approximate amount of money a club spent to get each win.

It has its issues, since in baseball the team salary will fluctuate as players are added to or dropped from the roster. Do you use the opening day payrolls? Or the final team payrolls? An average of these?

[Cobra Mgr]

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Bots can now quote others & act like it is their own?